IF YOU FOLLOW MY POSTS at all, you are probably well aware that I owe a majority of my love for food and cooking to my dad, a lifetime cook and chef and the chief architect of my palate. My father's home cooking holds true to his Southern upbringing, specifically being the eldest of twelve kids in a household in Orangeburg, SC, having helped his own mother feed his own siblings since his early teens.

He returned from New York City to Orangeburg soon after he retired from executive chefhood some ten+ years ago, so I've had to suffer being without his authentic and indigenous soulful Southern dishes for long stretches of time, happily interrupted once or twice a year when I go down to visit him or he comes up to NYC to visit me.

Well, he just spent a little more than a weekend here in the city, and one of the first things he did was drive by my apartment to gift me with some smoked chicken sausage, thick slab bacon, and, most importantly, liver pudding, which I've explained in a previous post is a Scrapple-like hodgepodge of seasoned ground pig parts mixed with rice and cased.

He also brought some signature "hash", his version of Carolina hash which is a BBQ dish of ground meat or chopped roast pork in a stewed, homemade barbecue sauce and almost always served over rice. (My dad uses ground chicken hearts and kidneys as his protein, and it's excellent!)

After a most disappointing lunch at Amy Ruth's—unfortunately believed to be one of the soul food landmarks of Harlem—it was so so great to have the flavorful, rich, layered, and balanced tastes of the Southern cuisine I as lucky to have grown up with. And growing up with these version of these dishes made me even more araid to try to recreate them myself.

But now I've decided that I shouldn't have to wait months to eat like this again. Although I couldn't even find grits—in my Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville—until Fairway opened up a year ago, I now know that I can just had up to most any East Harlem supermarket to get the smoked sausage or even liver pudding.

The hash, on the other hand, I will now have to bravely recreate on my very own, and I hope I do my dad proud. So, here, witness my morning of Souther happiness, and espy the inspiration for what will be my first and very own Carolina hash.